‘BERNHARDT/HAMLET’: Dylan Baker & Janet McTeer. Photo: Joan Marcus

BERNHARDT/HAMLET
Written by Theresa Rebeck
Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel
Through November 18, 2018
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd Street
(212) 719-1300
www.RoundaboutTheatre.org

By David NouNou

Playwright Theresa Rebeck is one of the few modern-day female playwrights who has made a major impact on the American theatrical stage. She is prolific and has good ideas. As in her previous outings Dead Accounts, Seminar and Mauritius, she starts with a great premise but somehow the plays never flesh out to full fruition.

The ambitious Bernhardt/Hamlet is no exception. Ms. Rebeck has Sarah Bernhardt (Janet McTeer) taking on the role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The conflict here is that no female has ever dared play the part of the Great Dane. The public would just not stand for it and it could turn out to be her biggest debacle. After all, Sarah Bernhardt was the foremost actress of her day and one of the most eccentric divas as well. Her offstage antics were just as publicized as her roles of Medea and Cleopatra, as well as Shakespeare’s heroines: Cordelia, Desdemona and Ophelia as well as her renowned Camille.

Act I is saddled with long-winded passages from Hamlet. Ms. Bernhardt is having difficulty with all the poetry that is essential to Hamlet and decides to engage French playwright, Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner), to revise Shakespeare and Hamlet and strip it of its poetry. This is where the humor is supposed to be. The plot is further mired with Bernhardt’s affair with the married Rostand. He forsakes his greatest masterpiece to do the revisions on Hamlet due to his love for Bernhardt.

The best scene in Act II comes when Madame Rostand (Ito Aghayere) forces her way in to see Bernhardt. Here, she presents Bernhardt with what will be Rostand’s greatest triumph Cyrano de Bergerac, but he has stopped working on it because of his love and trying to fulfill his obligation to Bernhardt. The scene then dissipates into scenes and passages from Cyrano and thus makes the evening interminable.

Kudos have to be given to the four supporting players that ground this show with their natural, low-keyed genuine performances; they are Matthew Saldivar (as Alphonse Mucha) who does all of Bernhardt’s divine posters but has problems drawing one for Hamlet, because he has never drawn men; just women at their glorified best. Next is Tony Carlin as the French critic Louis who has problems accepting a woman playing Hamlet. Equally wonderful is Nick Westrate as Maurice, Bernhardt’s steadfast son, who comes to knock some sense into her and her Hamlet folly. Last but not least is Ito Aghayere as Rostand’s wife, Rosamond; her quiet dignity brings reality to the forefront.

It is never easy for one actress to capture another actress’ essence, especially on the stage and certainly someone like Sarah Bernhardt of whom 2018 audiences know nothing except what we have read about her. It is Ms. McTeer’s impossible task to come up with a creditable interpretation of the fire that was Bernhardt. Instead, we have a petulant Sarah bossing people around to satisfy her whims and throwing giddy tantrums. She comes across more as the wonderful late British actress Kay Kendall and Vanessa Redgrave but lacking any nuances. It’s a full-throttle performance that, while enthusiastic, never varies much.

Alas, part of the problem is with Moritz von Stuelpnagel, a splendid director of the absurd. Remember his Hand to God and last year’s Present Laughter, both flawlessly directed? He has derailed the proceedings without imbuing any seamless shadings or editing. In this case, it is a free-for-all of the preposterous with no reining in of the rough edges that are way over-the-top for his leading lady and the plotline.

A high note of the evening is the set designs by Beowulf Borritt, a genius for any season.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published September 28, 2018
Reviewed at September 27, 2018 press performance.

‘BERNHARDT/HAMLET’: Jason Butler Harner & Janet McTeer. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘BERNHARDT/HAMLET’: (left to right) Dylan Baker, Jason Butler Harner, Janet McTeer & Matthew Saldivar. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘BERNHARDT/HAMLET’: (left to right) Dylan Baker, Janet McTeer & Jason Butler Harner. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘BERNHARDT/HAMLET’: Janet McTeer. Photo: Joan Marcus

‘BERNHARDT/HAMLET’: Janet McTeer & Brittany Bradford. Photo: Joan Marcus

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‘JUNK’: Matthew Rauch & Steven Pasquale. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

JUNK
By Ayad Akhtar
Directed by Doug Hughes
Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont
50 Lincoln Center Plaza
212-362-7200, www.lct.org

By Scott Harrah

The maxim “truth is stranger than fiction” certainly applies to fact-based dramas chronicling the greed, glory and guile of the financial world like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street and the British stage bio-drama Enron. Junk, playwright Ayad Akhtar’s often riveting, unusual follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced, is a fictionalized composite of such real-life Wall Street devils as Michael Millken and Ivan Boesky. It has all the elements of a bona fide blockbuster about the go-go 1980s, complete with high-tech sets by John Lee Beatty.

Steven Pasquale plays Robert Merkin (loosely based on Michael Millken), the mastermind behind a Los Angeles-based investment firm that specializes in hostile takeovers circa 1985. Mr. Merkin gets a lot of media attention for claiming that debt payments can be somehow transformed into big bucks. Much of the story centers on Merkin’s company working on a Pennsylvania company, Everson Steel, a family business run by CEO Thomas Everson, Jr. (Rick Holmes).

A cast of unsavory characters add intrigue to the fast-paced but all-too-familiar action, from corporate shark Israel Peterman (Matthew Rauch) to investors Leo Tesler (Michael Siberry) and Murry Lefkowitz (Ethan Phillips), Jacqueline Blount (Ito Aghayere) as a mole planted at Everson Steel, ruthless young journalist Judy Chen (Teresa Avia Lim), and Joey Slotnick as Boris Pronsky, an arbitrageur who profits from manipulating price inefficiencies in financial markets. As confusing as corporate finance can be to the layperson, Mr. Akhtar makes everything unfold seamlessly as if it were a fun escapist Hollywood movie.

John Lee Beatty’s clever sets (featuring flashing numbers and lit-up compartments on stage that may remind some of TV’s “Hollywood Squares”) move the story around brilliantly from Los Angeles to New York to Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

Most of the cast of 23 each give solid performances, but Junk is a far cry from Disgraced,  Mr. Akhtar’s play about Islamophobia and a dinner party gone horribly wrong. That show was the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for drama, with an acclaimed Broadway run in 2014. Director Doug Hughes deserves credit for keeping Junk moving at a wonderfully fluid pace, but with so many characters and subplots, the story might have been more focused and powerful with minor trimming of the narrative fat.

As Robert Merkin, Steven Pasquale lacks the sense of Machiavellian menace necessary to truly make the character effective, and this is unfortunate since the whole play is basically his story. Junk is, without question, an entertaining epic about the excesses of the 1980s but it curiously has nothing new or insightful to say about an era when junk bonds and insider trading wreaked havoc in America.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published November 6, 2017
Reviewed at November 5, 2017 press performance.

‘JUNK’: Teresa Avia Lim & Michael Siberry. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

‘JUNK’: Steven Pasquale. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

‘JUNK’: Ito Aghayere & Matthew Saldivar. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

‘JUNK’: Henry Stram (standing) & Rick Holmes (seated). Photo: T. Charles Erickson

‘JUNK’: The company. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

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HUNKA HUNKS OF BURNING LOVE: David Josefsberg (center) & a chorus of Elvis impersonators in ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ Photo: Joan Marcus

HONEYMOON IN VEGAS
Book by Andrew Bergman
Music & lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Directed by Gary Griffin
Nederlander Theatre, 208 West 41st Street
(877-250-2929), www.honeymoonbroadway.com

By Scott Harrah

Old-school Las Vegas is always portrayed with shameless romanticism. Although the glittering city of slot machines, showgirls and mobsters in the 1960s has been mined in countless movies and books, it has never been depicted quite like anything in this entertaining musical stage adaptation of the 1992 Nicholas Cage/Sarah Jessica Parker movie Honeymoon in Vegas, now on Broadway after a successful stint at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. As a musical, the show works, with plot-propelling songs and the razzle-dazzle production numbers and glittery costumes one would expect from a story set in Vegas.

Rob McClure (best known to Broadway audiences for his role in the tepid, ill-fated Chaplin back in 2012) is merely serviceable as Jack Singer, the proverbial putz who has been dating sexy Betsy (the beautiful and winsome Brynn O’Malley) for five years. As a leading man, Mr. McClure has all the appeal of a stale old piece of toast.

Jack is haunted by the deathbed declaration of his late mother, Bea (Nancy Opel), a cartoonish, nagging Jewish mama. She tells him he must show he only loves her in the song “Never Get Married.” However, Jack defies his dead mama’s wishes and takes Betsy to Las Vegas and plans to marry her.

Honeymoon in Vegas is mired in stereotypes, of course, but what story about Vegas isn’t? Tony Danza’s Tommy Korman, the aging “boss” of the Strip, is still mourning the loss of his beloved wife, a big-haired bimbo whose penchant for reading trashy Sidney Sheldon novels while lying in the sun slathered in coconut oil resulted in an early death from skin cancer. Betsy just happens to be a dead ringer for Tommy’s late wife, so one can guess what eventually happens when he meets her.

Danza’s Tommy is the villain here—Jack faces a tough choice after losing Betsy in a poker game to the guy—but we root for him far more than Jack. With his heavy New York accent and debonair gangster stage presence, Tommy is equal parts Tony Banta from his iconic role on “Taxi,” with many shades of Sinatra. Mr. Danza is total smarmy charm throughout the show, from a winning tap-dance number to such cheesy solo ballads as “Come to An Agreement.”

The story travels from Vegas to Hawaii as Jack tries to win back Betsy and the narrative becomes even more preposterous. Is it a problem when one finds the antagonist in a musical more fascinating than the hero? Does it matter? After all, this a show based on a film perhaps most famous for a scene showing a group of Elvis impersonators skydiving out of a plane. That scene is reproduced with hilarious results here, complete with the number “Airport Song,” and lyrics about how every plane that isn’t nonstop always has to connect through Atlanta.

Don’t come to Honeymoon in Vegas expecting high art or great choreography (the dance moves by Denis Jones are energetic but pedestrian). However, there is a lot to love if you’re a fan of the movie. Even if you’re not, it is rare to find a show like this, with a full orchestra, a gorgeous overture (complete with musicians jamming onstage), a catchy score and glitzy costumes. The musical is colorful and high-spirited enough to lift almost anyone out of the midwinter doldrums.

VEGAS-BOUND: Rob McClure (left) & ensemble in ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ Photo: Joan Marcus

HIGH ROLLERS: Tony Danza (seated, far left) & Rob McClure in ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ Photo: Joan Marcus

JOHNNY SANDWICH & TOMMY: Matthew Saldivar & Tony Danza in ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ Photo: Joan Marcus

A GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT: Tony Danza & RobMcClure discuss how to pay a gambling bet in ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ Photo: Joan Marcus

MAMA’S DEATHBED WISH: Rob McClure & Nancy Opel in ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ Photo: Joan Marcus

FIGHTING OFF AMOROUS ADVANCES IN HAWAII: Rob McClure & Catherine Ricafort. Photo: Joan Marcus

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published January 21, 2015
Reviewed at press performance on January 20, 2015

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